‘Zac’s Control Panel is a collection of famed experimental author Dennis Cooper’s short, transmutational works employing and ‘misplacing’ animated gifs. As in his highly acclaimed and popular novel Zac’s Haunted House, Cooper uses the gif as a language-like material to reposition, in the case of these new works, forms considered literary (the short story, flash fiction, the poem) and nondenominational (the documentary, the reenactment) into complex, poetic, claptrap visual literary mediums.’

‘You could call Zac’s Haunted House many things: net art, a glorified Tumblr, a visual novel, a mood board, or a dark night of the Internet’s soul. ….Even now, to call a series of gifs a novel—a form arguably premised on the deft wielding of language—is a bold move. Gifs are often regarded as shallow, and they are essentially gestural rather than linguistic, a kind of visual shorthand, pointing to a mass of material that is supposed to speak for itself. Animated gifs disregard genre, pedigree, or distinctions between high and low culture, and are at once contemporary and primal. They are more than quick bursts of looped movement, and may actually do something quite deep in their sheer breadth—namely, capture our ephemeral cultural memory. They are easily shared, easily understood, and yet more gifs doesn’t necessarily clarify or enlighten. Instead, they overwhelm. But even if Cooper’s raw material for his new work is inherently unnovelistic, he constructs a narrative by way of recurring motifs and juxtapositions, as in a stretch of chapter one where five gifs of pouring water are stacked one on top of each other with a gif of a flailing boy on a floor on the receiving end of the stream, or a passage of chapter two that is predominately composed of scenes of falling or mishaps reminiscent of ‘FAIL’ memes that end in another splash of water. By harnessing a way of communicating that prizes brevity and the hook and lure of bright novelty, Cooper constructs a mise en scene of the type the characters that tend to populate his novels might make. Here, he has used the ready-mades at hand‑or at click—and what’s crowding up to our hands now are jpegs and gifs begging to be pinched, zoomed, dragged, copied, or trashed.’